Mass Culture Reflection Of Shanghai In The 1920s

Banyue was set up in September,1921, and was renamed as Violet in December, 1925. It had published 8 volumes (192 issues) in total throughout the 1920s in Shanghai, earning the name of King of Magazines and Champion of Magazines in Shanghai. As a metropolitan publication of popular literature, Banyue and Violet stormed Shanghai in the 1920s, enthusiastically received by the masses. But for a long time afterwards, they were being spurned and reproached, not receiving due justice from domestic scholars. In the middle and late 1980s, Banyue and Violet became source materials widely referred as the national light literature and Mandarin duck Group, much studied in the academia. However, we have not seen any articles or books specially dedicated to the research on the magazines. To complement the systematic research on the magazines, the thesis tries to study the mass culture in Shanghai in the 1920s, with the focus on Banyue and Violet.This thesis analyses the mass culture from the perspectives of media, text and society. In Chapterâ… , the author sums up the excelsior editing, typesetting and flexible commercial operations of the magazines, regarding the magazine as a mass media. The author also expounds the relationship between literature and modern media, the way of cultural expression with the aid of Pierre Bourdieu's conception of Field, paving the way for the following text analysis. In Chapterâ…¡, the author selects novelettes from heterogeneous texts of the magazines for case study, giving a deep interpretation of their texts through an internal-literature way. The author identifies such charms of Banyue and Violet as original, classic, illuminative, modern. The author classifies the original texts and analyzes them in terms of narratology, in order to sum up the charm and meaning of Mandarin duck Group literature. Chapterâ…¢offers a social analysis, the method shifting from interior literature to exterior literature. The author observes the text by putting it back in the historical context, and analyzes the magazine's huge number of writers and heterogeneous style of texts, probing the writing manner of Banyue and Violet which is essentially writing for the masses. During dissertating, the author uses Public Sphere Theory of Juergen Habermas, looking at texts other than novelettes, and thus portrays the mass culture reflection of Shanghai back in the 1920s.